Jay Clark Buckey, Jr. (born June 6, 1956, in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

) is an American

physician A physician, medical practitioner (British English), medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the Medical education, study, Med ...

and

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a List of human spaceflight programs, human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spa ...

who flew aboard one

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...

mission ( STS-90) as a

Payload Specialist A payload specialist (PS) was an individual selected and trained by commercial or research organizations for flights of a specific payload on a NASA Space Shuttle mission. People assigned as payload specialists included individuals selected by t ...

. Buckey briefly ran for the Democratic nomination to challenge New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu, a first term Republican, when he was up for re-election in 2008. Buckey withdrew from the race when former Governor

Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia Jeanne Shaheen ( ; née Bowers, born January 28, 1947) is an American politician and former educator serving since 2009 as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from New Hampshire. A ...

entered the race.

Education

Buckey holds a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

(1977) and an M.D. from Cornell in 1981, interning at

New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (abbreviated as NYP) is a nonprofit academic medical center in New York City. It is the primary teaching hospital for Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The hospit ...

and completing his residence at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Currently, Buckey is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

of Medicine at the

Geisel School of Medicine The Geisel School of Medicine is the medical school of Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire. The fourth oldest medical school in the United States, it was founded in 1797 by New England physician Nathan Smith (physician, born 1762) ...

. He was also a flight surgeon with the U.S. Air Force Reserve for 8 years.

Spaceflight experience

In 1998 he was a

aboard NASA

flight STS-90 as part of the Neurolab mission from April 17 to May 3, 1998. Aboard the Neurolab Mission, Buckey was the

for the experiment " Cardiovascular Adaptation to Zero-Gravity" and assisted with other Spacelab Life Sciences experiments. During the 16-day Spacelab flight, the seven person crew aboard Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' served as both experiment subjects and operators for 26 individual life science experiments focusing on the effects of

microgravity Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight, i.e., zero apparent weight. It is also termed zero g-force, or zero-g (named after the g-force) or, incorrectly, zero gravity. Weight is a measurement of the fo ...

on the

brain The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...

and

nervous system In biology, the nervous system is the complex system, highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its behavior, actions and sense, sensory information by transmitting action potential, signals to and from different parts of its body. Th ...

. The STS-90 flight orbited the Earth 256 times, covered 6.3 million miles, and logged him over 381 hours in space.

Politics

Research

In 2018, Buckey was part of research using

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

, at the

Australian Antarctic Division The Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) is a division of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment & Water. The division undertakes science programs and research projects to contribute to an understanding of Antarctica and the S ...

Mawson Station Mawson Station, commonly called Mawson, is one of three permanent bases and research outposts in Antarctica managed by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). Mawson lies in Holme Bay in Mac. Robertson Land, East Antarctica in the Australian ...

, wherein the expeditioners used VR headsets to view Australian beach scenes, European nature scenes, and North American nature scenes of forests and urban environments, which were different from the isolation of the whiteness and silence of Antarctica. The research will inform psychological techniques to support long duration spaceflight such as for astronauts going to Mars. Virtual reality beaches in Antarctica beating isolation and helping future astronauts
Carla Howarth,

ABC News Online ABC News, also known as ABC News and Current Affairs, is a public news service produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The service covers both local and world affairs, broadcasting both nationally as ABC News, and across the Asia- ...

, 2018-10-10

References

External links

Spacefacts biography of Jay C. Buckey
{{DEFAULTSORT:Buckey, Jay C. 1956 births Living people Physician astronauts United States Air Force Medical Corps officers New Hampshire Democrats Geisel School of Medicine faculty Cornell University College of Engineering alumni NASA civilian astronauts American astronaut-politicians Weill Cornell Medical College alumni Space medicine doctors Space Shuttle program astronauts United States Air Force reservists